The charts provided here illustrates my complaints against SAN vendor doctrine,
obstinately adhering to the concept of one large pool of disks
from which all volumes are created for any purpose (data, log, and junk).
There is no consideration for the radically different characteristics of hard disks
in random versus sequential IO
(low and high queue depth IO behavior should also be an element of IO strategy).
The architecture of all traditional relational database engines are built on the premise
that high volume log writes are possible at very low latency in order to provide
durability of transactions.
And yet SAN vendors blithely disregard this to justify their mission
to sell inexpensive commodity hardware at extraordinarily prices.

Transaction Performance Data

The chart below is CPU.
The horizontal axis is time.
One major division marked by the vertical line is 1 minute,
and the small tick is 12 sec.
The data points are 5 sec. There are 12 steps between each major division.
The vertical axis is overall (system) CPU utilization in percent.
Each of the stacked green lines represents an individual processor.
There are 16 physical cores and 32 logical.
A single logical core at 100% utilization would show a separation of 3.125% between lines.

On the second chart, the red line is the performance monitor object: SQL Server:Databases, counter: Transactions/sec.
Note that the vertical axis is log-scale, base 10. One major division is a factor of 10.
Each minor tick is an integer.
The first small tick up from a major tick is 2, the next is 3 and so on to 9 for the last small tick.

The third chart is IOPS. Green is data reads, blue is data writes, and red is log writes.
The vertical axis is log scale.

The fourth chart is IO latency, milli-sec per IO.
The same color codes applies as for IOPS.
Again the vertical axis is log scale.

The SQL

The SQL activity is batch driven transaction processing.
There are 14 or so threads concurrently looping through a set of items to be processed.
Each item involves about 20 rows of insert or update activity,
hence 1000 log writes per sec corresponds to approximately 20,000 transaction/sec on the SQL counter.

Most of the active data is in memory.
There are probably 30-40 SELECT rows for each transaction
or twice as many reads as writes.
The data IO reads necessary to support the 20,000 inserts and updates/sec is about 2,000/sec,
which the storage system is capable of supporting at about 4ms latency.
This is because the data resides a small part of each disk.
The actual latency for random IO is less than the expected value of 7.5 ms
for data randomly accessed over an entire (10K) disk at queue depth 1.

For approximately 20 seconds out of each minute,
the transaction rate drops from the peak value of 20,000
all the way down to about 8,000 per sec
(noting the log scale).
These are the check points when the data write IO surges to 20-50K IOPS,
(which demonstrates that thee storage system is actually pretty decent)
even though write latency is driven up to 50-90ms.

The checkpoint surge also pushes log write latency up from 1ms to 20-30ms.
This dataset occurred during the day,
when presumably there was activity for other hosts on different volumes
but on the same SAN.
At night, log write latency away from checkpoints could be under 0.3ms even at high volume.

The Storage System

I had not previously discussed the storage configuration in detail.
The storage system consists of 240 x 10K HDDs only, with the standard system level caching.
The SQL Server host is connected to the SAN over 4 FC ports
(8Gb from host to switch, 4Gb from switch to SAN, and presumably 4Gb on the SAN backend?).
The data is distributed over 8 volumes.
The log is on a separate volume as seen by the host OS.

The Problem

The problem is that on the SAN, all disks are aggregated into a single pool, from which volumes are created.
This was done per standard SAN vendor doctrine.
Their magically great and powerful "value-add" intelligence would solve all your performance problems.
We cannot ask for dedicated physical disks for the log because the SAN was already configured,
with the SAN admin getting assistance from the SAN vendor's field engineer
who followed the SAN vendor's doctrine.

Input from the DBA team was not solicited
and would have ignored in any case.
Besides, there are no unallocated disks.
And no, the SAN team will buy more disks because there are no empty bays in the disk enclosures.
And there is no room for more enclosures in the storage rack.
So the DBA request is denied.

Even if we put up the money to get an extra cabinet for one more disk enclosure,
the SAN admin will still refuse to configure dedicated physical disks for the log volume
because the SAN vendor said that their great and powerful SAN will solve all performance problems.
Any problems must be with their application and not the SAN.
As can be seen from the charts above, this is a load of crap.

The SAN Vendor Solution

As I said above, this particular SAN is comprised of 240 or so 10K HDDs.

Naturally the SAN vendor's proposed solution is that we should buy more of their value-add products
in the form of auto-tiering SSD-HDD, and perhaps additional SSDs as flash-cache.
The particular SAN with base features probably has an amortized cost of $4,000 per HDD.
So SAN with 240 disks would cost just under $1M (while still failing to provide desired database performance characteristics).
A mid-range SAN might have amortized cost per disk of $1,500-2K. Enterprise SAN could be $4-6K per disk.

The additional value-add features would substantially increase the already high cost,
while providing only minor improvement, because the checkpoint IO surge will still drive up log write latency.

The sad thing is that the SAN group might buy into this totally stupid idea,
and refuse to acknowledge that the correct solution is to simply have dedicated physical disks for the logs.
If there were dedicated physical disks, the checkpoint data IO surge goes to completely different physical disks
than the log disks.

In the specific example, it is not necessary to have separate FC ports for the logs.
The 50K IOPS at 8K per IO generates 400MB/sec, which is only 25-33% of the realizable IO bandwidth of 4 x 4Gbit/s FC ports.
The checkpoint IO surge would increase latency on data reads,
but the primary reason for the performance drop is the increase (degradation) in log write latency.

Another angle is changing the checkpoint parameters in SQL Server,
but the real problem is because we are prevented from leveraging the pure sequential IO characteristics of HDDs
by allocating data and log volumes from a common pool.

One more item. In the old days before we had immense memory,
typical transactional database data read/write mix was 50/50.
This is because a read forces a dirty page to be written to disk.
In this situation, a data write IO surge would also depress the data reads necessary to support transactions.
So the standard practice those days was to set the checkpoint interval
to infinity to prevent data write IO surges.
In our case, very little data reads are necessary to support transactions,
so the checkpoint surge might depress data reads should have lesser impact on transactions.
It is the increase in log write latency that is depressing transaction volume.

Solutions that work

A solution that would work is simply to have separate dedicated physical disks for the log volume.
It is that simple!
And yet this is not possible because the SAN people would refuse to do this, as it is not in their agenda.

It is unfortunate that the only practical solution is to get the critical database off the corporate SAN.
I have done this by going to all flash in the form of PCI-E SSDs.
That is, SSDs installed internal to SQL Server system.
This is not because the exceptional performance characteristics of SSDs were required.

It was because I needed to get away from the SAN admin and his dogmatic adherence of SAN vendor doctrine.
The IO performance requirements could have been meet with a direct-attach HDD array (or on a SAN).
But anything with HDD enclosures would have been under the authority of the SAN admin,
who would have nixed any storage components that was not a SAN,
and then configured it according the SAN vendor principles.

I have used the excuse that PCI-E SSD "accelerators" are needed for tempdb,
which are not really "storage",
hence there is no IT department mandate that it be on the SAN,
under the absolute control of the SAN admin.
In fact there were no special requirements for tempdb different from that of data.
Then for unrelated reasons, there was enough capacity to put the entire DB on local SSD.
Perhaps a file group with non-critical objects could reside on the SAN
to carry the pretense of the local SSD not really being storage.

Addendum

Note that I have not naively suggested engaging in constructive dialog with the SAN team.
They are on a holy mission that has no alignment with their company/organization's mission.
Anything the contradicts SAN scripture is heresy.

Oracle database machine has been described as hardware optimized for Oracle database.
In fact the true mission is to take the SAN admin out of the loop.
I think HP offered appliance oriented systems for SQL Server in 2012?,
but they only system option was the DL980? which is severely narrow market segment.
There needs to be DL380 and 580 options as well.

It has been over 7 years now that I have made my
ExecStats
(current version Exec Stats 2015-02-18)
tool publicly available (late 2007), with prototype versions going back to 2006. The two distinguishing elements of ExecStats is 1) the emphasis on cross-referencing a) query execution statistics to b) index usage via the c) execution plans, and 2) saving information locally so that it can be sent to a remote expert.

The more recent versions now have the capability to simultaneous group stored procedure statements together while consolidating SQL by query hash. On the performance (counter) monitoring, charts are now displayed on logarithmic scale, allow insight over several decades of dynamic range.

Too many of the commercial SQL Server performance tool emphasis generating pretty charts and reports on query execution statistics, thinking that by giving the top SQL to the originating developer is all that is expected of the DBA. In principle the DBA should have greater expertise on SQL Server performance than a developer, who is expert on the development platform (Visual Studio or other) and perhaps the business logic.

In any case, the query execution statistics by itself is not very helpful, without the execution plan, and possibly the difference between estimated and actual rows. We should first appreciate that SQL Server is of some complexity, with several factors that could have adverse impact on performance.

Examples are 1) does the table architecture support the business logic, 2) is the SQL written in manner that the query optimizer can interpret in the desired manner, 3) having a few good indexes, 4) no more indexes than necessary, 5) a good statistics strategy, not just frequency of rebuilds but also whether full scan samples are necessary, and possibly explicit statistics update in between certain SQL statements typically for ETL, 6) compile parameter issues, 7) row estimation issues at the source, 8) serious row estimate errors after intermediate operations (not at the source) and of course 9) system level issues.

Some very advanced tools have the capability of generating alternative SQL in an attempt to solve a performance problem. The question is have other factors been considered before jumping into re-writing the SQL?

I have had good success with ExecStats in onsite engagements in greatly simplifying data collection and to a degree the analysis as well. On many occasions I have been able solve simple or medium complexity issues remotely with just the information collected by ExecStats. It should be able to work against Azure as well, but this is only tested intermittently (and on request).
People are invite to use and send feedback.

The system stored procedures in SQL Server from the very beginning(?) provide useful information.
However they have not been updated in a substantial manner for the new features in later versions,
nor have they been extended with additional details that are now available in the DMVs for more sophisticated DBA's.
Presumably, this is for backward compatibility.
As an alternative, there is a provision for creating custom procedures that behave as system procedure
with sp_ms_marksystemobject.

In the case of sp_helpindex
new features of are included columns, filtered indexes, compression and partitioning.
Other information of interest might be size, index usage and statistics.
Part of the reason for not changing could be for backward compatibility, which is fine,
but let's then make new system procedures with extended information.

In the text of sp_helpindex for SQL Server 2012,
the only difference from earlier versions is that the description field has a provision for columnstore.
The SQL Server 2014 version adds hash index and memory optimized in the description field.

Below is my new procedure for extended index information.
I have retained the same error checking code from the original.
The cursor loop to assemble the index key columns has been replaced with
a code sequence using the
STUFF function
and FOR XML PATH.
A similar structure reports on the included columns.
This procedure does not replicate the index description field of the original,
but rather has a limited description and a separate field for the type code.

USE master

GO

CREATE procedure
[dbo].[sp_helpindex3]

@objname nvarchar(776)

AS

DECLARE @objid int

, @dbname sysname

-- Check to see that the object names are local to the current database.

Information from my extended version of index help are space, index usage,
and statistics.
The DMV/F function
dm_db_stats_properties
was added in
SQL Server (SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2, SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1.
The function
STATS_DATE was added in SQL Server 2008
can be used if dm_db_stats_properties is not supported.

We could also join to
dm_db_index_operational_stats,
dm_db_index_physical_stats
or
dm_db_xtp_index_stats
for additional information,
but I do not think the extra information is necessary for routine use.

The above query might be more useful as a view capable of reporting on indexes for all tables and indexed views, but is there a system view option?

It is too bad more statistics information in DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS is not available
in query form.

ps
I am not sure why color coding is not display, see the same page
on my web site
sp_helpindex3 for
pps
We could also do an option to show indexes for all tables, leaving off the object_id =.

This topic is titled to specifically consider only row estimation after joins, precluding discussion of row estimates at the source table, which has already been addressed in papers covering the new Cardinality Estimator in SQL Server 2014 and other statistics papers for previous versions of SQL Server.

There are certain situations in which the query compile time can be excessively long even for queries of moderate complexity. This could be true when the plan cost is very high, so that the query optimizer expends more effort to find a better plan before reaching the time out, that is, the time out setting appear to be a function of the plan cost. Even then, the query optimizer could still make row estimation errors in the operations after the source table (for which data distribution statistics are kept on columns and indexes) of sufficient consequence that renders the remainder of the plan un-executable in a practical time frame.

The new cardinality estimator in SQL Server 2014 is helpful in resolving known issues, but has little to improve row estimates after the initial access at the data source beyond fixed rules which may be more generally true than the rule used before. That said, the query optimizer only attempts to estimate rows (and other cost factors) using a combination of the information it has, and rules for situations where there are no grounds for making a knowledge based estimate.

So why be bound by this rule of estimating only? The other company (only sometimes in the news concerning databases) has (recently introduced?) adaptive query optimization that can make run-time adjustments to the execution plan. Sure that’s nice, but I am thinking something more sophisticated could done in forming the plan but less complex than the ability to change course in the midst of execution.

Obviously, if a query has an obviously correct execution plan that can be determined by existing techniques, and the plan cost is fairly low, then no change is necessary. Further special technique should only be considered for expensive queries, particularly in which the row estimates at the intermediate steps are difficult to assess.

From statistics, we know approximately how many countries have a name beginning with Z. SQL Server also has a histogram for the NationId column in the Customers table. If we had specified the list of NationId values (with equality on to both tables), SQL Server could use the more detailed information from the histogram to make a row estimate. But because we specified the Country name column that is only in the Nation table, we must use the average number of customers per county (in the density vector) multiplied by the number of countries to estimate rows after the join to customers.

And next of course, all customers are not alike. There are customers who place a small, medium or large number of orders. So why expend a great deal of effort to find a plan from all the possible join orders and index combination based on only estimates of rows when it is known that data distribution in each succeeding table is heavily skewed. Why not pre-execute the tables for which a SARG was specified to get the column values used in the join to next table so that the more detailed histogram distribution information. This technique could be pushed to multiple levels depending on the initially assessed plan cost, and perhaps controlled by a query hint.

For example, in the above query, suppose NationId’s 19, 37, 42, and 59 meet the criteria Country beginning with Z. The optimizer would next look at the Customers table histogram on NationId for these values to estimate rows after the join. If the situation warrants, the next level could be examined as well.

It could be argued that the query optimizer should not execute the query to determine the plan, but why follow that principle if the cost of query optimization is excessively high (several seconds) in relation to relatively minor effort to make a more extensive reconnaissance (of tens or hundreds of milli-seconds)? Especially considering that the reliability of row estimates becomes progressively worse after each join or other operation beyond the original source?

This technique should probably be used when there are tables with search arguments joining to tables on columns with highly skewed distribution. The first implementation might be activated only be a query hint until some maturity is achieved, followed by greater use.

Presumably there might be a cost threshold as well. I would prefer not to tie it with parallelism. Of course, given the nature of modern systems, it really is time for the cost threshold for parallelism and max degree of parallelism to have graduated controls, instead of the single setting on-off.

Side note 1

OK, now forget what I said at the beginning and I will gripe about SQL Server default statistics. It has been discussed else where that SQL Server uses random page samples and not random row samples, as this is a much less expensive way to collect data. It does use an index for which the column is not a lead key if available, to improve randomness. Still, I have notice a severe sensitivity to sampling percentage in cases where the column value is correlated with (page) storage location.

So I suggest that as the page sampling is in progress, a count of new values found in each successive page sampled versus existing values be kept. If the number of new values found falls off sharply, then most distinct values have probably been found, and the interpretation of the existing sample is that its distribution should be scaled by ratio of total rows to the rows sampled. If almost of the values in the last few pages sampled are new (not previously found), then the interpretation should be that the number of distinct values should be scaled by the total to sample ratio. And some blend when there is an intermediate number of new values versus previously found values in each successive page.

Addendum

The query optimization/plan compile process is single threaded.
The modern microprocessor might be 3GHz, so a 10 sec compile is 30 Billion cpu-cycles.
And I have seen compiles run more than 100 sec? One query even broke SQL Server, of course that was a set of deeply nested, repeating CTE's that should have been PIVOT/UNPIVOT.
So why the principle of optimizing based on unreliable estimates when an index seek is a mere 10 micro-sec? Presumably the key column statistics have already been decoded.

It would be nice to have a more powerful query optimizer,
but there is a method for writing SQL to get a specific execution plan,
Bushy Joins.
Of course the other element in this is known what the correct execution plan is.
This involves not what the query optimizer uses for cost model,
but what the true cost model is.

Earlier I had commented on the TPC-H results
published in April of this year for SQL Server 2014
using clustered column store storage, noting that two of the 22 TPC-H queries did not perform
well in column store.
I had speculated on the reason without investigation (I should have learned by now not to do this),
that perhaps the cause was that the row store result benefited from date correlation optimization.
Thomas suggested otherwise (see below) pointing out that column store has an alternative mechanism
of greater general usefulness in the keeping min/max on each columns,
along with citing the join to Customers as a more likely explanation,
evident in the query plan (which is why one should always provide the plan).

Thomas Kejser Comments
I am not sure your theory is correct in the case of Q10.
It is noteworthy that the column store requires that the join with CUSTOMER is performance before the sort on revenue.
The row store on the other hand can do a loop join (so can the column store, but that is not the plan you get it seem).

This must mean that the sort buffer is significantly larger for the column store (as reflected in the plan estimates)
- which in turn can cause a rather significant memory consumption.
It is also noteworthy that the column store does not seem to push the return flag predicate into the storage engine.

With column storage segments storing the min/max of all values contain in each column,
it is unclear if the date correlation provides any benefit that isn't already gain from the segment header.

Another odd thing about the column store plan of Q10 is that the join of LINEITEM/ORDER is hashed,
while the probe happens on CUSTOMER.
Unless the predicate on RETURNFLAG is very selective (I don't recall) this is the wrong way around and may cause further spilling

This is easy enough to test. First strategy is to remove the CUSTOMER and NATION tables
from the query, making it a pure
Below is the test version of Query 10.

The execution plan for the test query is below with row-store. (Top operation to the left not shown for compactness).

The execution plan for the test query is below with column-store. (Top operation also not shown).

The two plans are essentially the same, with the difference being that the column-store
plans applies the ReturnFlag as a filter operation instead of as a predicate in
the LINEITEM access.
I suppose this is because each column is stored separately, or perhaps this is just
the way the column-store plan is shown.
About 25% of rows in LINEITEM meet the ReturnFlag = R condition.

So it is clear that TK had the correct explanation for the poor column store
performance relative to row store in the case of Q10.
The counter test for my original suggestion,
is to explicitly apply the date range on LINEITEM discovered by the date correlation optimization
in row-store, L_SHIPDATE between 1993-09-20 and 1994-06-17.
As pointed out earlier, the actual ship date range 1993-10-02 and 1994-05-02.
This further improved the Columnstore result to
Col Store CPU time = 2686 ms, elapsed time = 403ms

This is a small improvement over the existing Columnstore min/max feature.
My thinking is that the row store date correlation feature is not particularly
useful in real world databases with highly irregular date correlation,
and that if such date correlation did exist,
the analyst should spell it out rather than depend on a database engine feature.
I am tempted to speculate that it might be better to partition on join columns instead
of date range, but perhaps I should not do so without investigation?
unless of course, this prompts someone else to do the investigation.

Now that we know were the problem occurred in Q10, we can attempt to rewrite the query to
avoid the error, as shown below.

The alternate query improved both the row and column-store query plans in pushing out the
join to Customers and Nation to after the Top clause.
The row-store plans is:

The column-store plan is below.

The impact is minimal in the row-store plan because the reduced number of index seeks for Customers
from 115 to 20 is small in the overall query.
For the column store plan, the performance retains most of the gains achieved in the Order-Lineitem
only test.
Col Store CPU time = 4218 ms, elapsed time = 598ms

In my test system, I have Q4 as 3 times faster with column-store over row-store,
so I do not know why the published reports have it as comparable or slower.

ps
columnstore is a very powerful. but the query optimizer is as mature as row store. So pay attention to the query plan.
this is an update to my previous post on this topic, not about updateable columnstore, which is updateable.

Three TPC-H benchmark results were published in April of this year at SQL Server 2014 launch,
where the new updateable columnstore feature was used.
SQL Server 2012 had non-updateable columnstore that required the base table to exist in rowstore form.
This was not used in the one published TPC-H benchmark result on SQL Server 2012,
which includes two refresh stored procedures, one inserting rows, the second deleting rows.
It is possible that the TPC-H rules do not allow a view to union two tables?
and perhaps a delete via the partitioning feature?
(meaning the delete range must match the partition boundaries).
Another possibility is that SQL Server 2012 columnstore was considered to be a multi-column index
which is also prohibited to reflect the principle of being ad-hoc queries.

SQL Server Columnstore

First a few quick words on SQL Server columnstore.
Columnstore is not actually an index of the b-tree index form.
The MSDN Columnstore Indexes Described
states that columnstore index is "a technology for storing, retrieving and managing data by using a columnar data format,
called a columnstore."
In SQL Server 2012, it is called a nonclustered columnstore index not because it is nonclustered or an index,
but because the base table must exist in traditional rowstore form.
In SQL Server 2014, there is a clustered columnstore index not because data is stored in order of the index key,
as there is no key, but rather that there is no rowstore table, just the columnstore.

TPC-H details Date Columns and Query SARGs

The full details of the TPC-H Decision Support benchmark are described on the
TPC.org website.
There are a few details of relevance to the use columnstore.
The largest table in TPC-H is LINEITEM, which has 3 date columns, ShipDate, ReceiptDate and CommitDate,
and is clustered on ShipDate.
The second largest table is ORDERS, clustered on the one date column OrderDate.
These two tables are joined on OrderKey.
There is correlation between values in the date columns in these two tables,
some natural, and others based on reasonable business conditions.
ShipDate must be greater than OrderDate obviously, and is also no more than 121 days greater
than OrderDate per benchmark specification built into the data generator.
CommitDate is between -89 and 91 days of ShipDate.
ReceiptDate is between 1 to 30 days after ShipDate.
The date values ranges from Jan 1992 to Dec 1998.

There are 22 Select queries in the TPC-H benchmark, along with the 2 refresh stored procedures.
Many of the Select queries specify a date range on one of the date columns
or a lower bound one date column and an upper bound on a different column.
Ideally, for queries that target rows in a limited date range,
we would like to have upper and lower bounds on for the cluster keys
on both the ORDERS and LINEITEM tables, OrderDate and ShipDate.
However the TPC-H rules do not permit re-writing the query SARGs
based on inferable knowledge.

That said, apparently the rules do not preclude the query optimizer
from discovering such knowledge.
One of the other RDBMSs was probably first to do this,
and Microsoft followed suit in order to be competitive in the TPC-H benchmark
with the Date Correlation Optimization
feature in 2005.
Personally, I am not aware of any production server using this feature.
Realistically, any organization that was having query performance issues
related to date range bounds would probably have directed the
analyst to apply appropriate date bounds on the cluster key.
This is most probably a benchmark specific optimization feature.

The date correlation optimization statistics do not exist when using clustered columnstore,
because there is no underlying rowstore table with foreign key relations?
The date correlation statistics do exist when using rowstore tables with foreign keys
and are used by nonclustered columnstore indexes?

TPC-H on SQL Server 2014 with Columnstore

That said, let us now look at the 3 new SQL Server 2014 TPC-H results published
making use of the new clustered columnstore indexes.
One is from IBM at Scale Factor 1000 (1TB)
and two from HP at 3TB and 10TB respectively.
The new results are compared to prior results with traditional rowstore
on previous versions of SQL Server and previous generation server systems.

Because Columnstore is not really an index in the b-tree sense,
given that queries frequently involve date ranges,
it is presumed to be important to use partitioning with Columnstore.
The three new TPC-H reports on SQL Server 2014 partition both ORDERS and LINEITEM
by OrderDate and ShipDate respectively (the cluster key in previous versions)
with a partition interval of 1 week (7 years x 52 weeks per year = 364 partitions).
Perhaps of interest, the scripts show that a rowstore partitioned index is first build
before building the partitioned clustered columnstore index.

TPC-H at SF 1000 (1TB)

The new TPC-H 1TB result on SQL Server 2014 using columnstore
is compared with 3 previous results on SQL Server 2008 R2.
There is a difference in memory configurations between the four systems below.
For SQL Server 2014 with clustered columnstore indexes,
the TPC-H SF1000 total database size is just under 430GB, so with 1TB memory,
the benchmark is running entirely in memory after the initial data load,
with the exception of hash operation spills to tempdb.

VendorSystem

ProcessorGHz

Sockets

CoresThreads

Mem

SQL

QphH

Power

Throughput

Date

IBMx3850 X6

E7-4890 v22.8

4

60/120

1536

2014

519.976

695,445

388,779

4/16/14

HPDL980 G7

E7-48702.4

8

80/160

2048

2008R2

219,888

233,119

207,407

8/30/11

IBMx3850 X5

E7-88702.4

8

80/80

2048

2008R2

173,961

200,889

150,635

5/20/11

CiscoUCS C460

E7-48702.4

4

40/?

1024

2008R2

134,117

156,157

115,188

12/7/11

For rowstore, the TPC-H SF1000 total database size is 1420GB,
so the two systems with 2TB memory are mostly running with data in memory,
again except for the initial load and spills to tempdb.
There is definitely disk IO for data in the Cisco system at 1TB physical memory.
The performance impact is noticeable, but probably not as severe as
one might think based on how people talk of memory.
The reason is that all of these systems make correct use of massively parallel
IO channels to storage capable of 10GB/s plus table scans,
and many of these also use SSD storage capable of more random IOPS than
SQL Server can consume even at very high parallelism.

The new SQL Server 2014 result is 2.36X higher on composite score (QphH)
and 3X higher in the Power test than previous versions with conventional rowstore.

The 22 individual query run times from the Power test at 1TB are shown below.
The SQL Server 2014 result is the left item in the legend label 4x60 (sockets/cores) and for the succeeding charts as well.

Query 1, a single table aggregation, is more than 10 times faster on SQL Server 2014 using
columnstore on 60 cores (Ivy-Bridge, 2.8GHz)
than 2008R2 using rowstore, on 80 cores(Westmere-EX).
Per TPC-H benchmark procedure, the test is run immediately after data load and index creation?
The second largest speed-up is Query 16, joining 3 tables, at 6.4X.

Query 10 is 40% slower with columnstore, and Query 4 about the same between columnstore and
conventional.
This query is listed near the end of this section on TPC-H.

Notice that in the 3 SQL Server 2008R2 results, Query 2 becomes slower
as the degree of parallelism increases from 40 cores (threads unspecified) to 80 cores/80 threads
and then to 80 cores/160 threads.
Elsewhere I had commented that SQL Server really needs a graduated approach to parallelism
instead of the all or nothing approach.

TPC-H at SF 3000 (3TB)

The new TPC-H 3TB result on SQL Server 2014 is compared with a previous result on SQL Server 2008R2.
Here, the difference in memory is a significant contributor.
The SQL Server 2014 system has more memory than the columnstore database,
while 2008R2 systems has much less memory than the 3TB rowstore database (4.5TB).

VendorSystem

ProcessorGHz

Sockets

CoresThreads

Mem

SQL

QphH

Power

Throughput

Date

HPDL580 G8

E7-4890 v22.8

4

60120

3072

2014

461,837

631,309

337,859

4/15/14

HPDL980 G7

X75602.27

8

64128

512

2008R2

162,601

185,297

142,685

6/21/10

I am supposing that the reason the HP 2010 report only configured 512GB
(128 x 4GB priced $29,440 in 2010)
was that there would not be a significant performance improvement for the
TPC-H 3TB result at either 1TB or even 2TB memory in relation to the higher price
(128 x 16GB priced $115K in 2011).

Several of the TPC-H queries involve nearly full table scans of the large tables.
If there is not sufficient memory for the entire database,
then the next objective is to have sufficient memory for reducing the spill to disk in hash operations?
HP may have elected for the better price-performance?
Or perhaps someone just wanted to make a point.
The point being that it is important for the SQL Server engine to function correctly
when heavy IO is required.

In the SQL Server 2014 result, the system has 3TB memory (96 x 32GB priced $96K in 2014)
which is sufficient to hold the entire data set for TPC-H 3TB in columnstore.

The overall composite score is 2.8X higher with columnstore and 3.4X higher on the Power test.

The 22 individual query run times from the Power test at 3TB are shown below.

The largest gain with column-store is Query 19 at 19.7X.
Query 4 and 10 show degradation,
similar to the case at SF1000.

TPC-H at SF 10000 (10TB)

The new TPC-H 10TB result on SQL Server 2014 is compared with a previous result on SQL Server 2012.
Strangely, supporting documentation for the HP 2013 report on SQL Server 2012
is missing so there is no indication as to whether nonclustered columnstore is
used?
I am guessing that columnstore was not used because the results are
in line with expectations on rowstore.

VendorSystem

ProcessorGHz

Sockets

CoresThreads

Mem

SQL

QphH

Power

Throughput

Date

HPDL580 G8

E7-4890 v22.8

4

60120

3072

2014

404,005

631,309

337,859

4/15/14

HPDL980 G7

E7-48702.4

8

80160

4096

2012

158,108

185,297

142,685

6/21/11

The full data size in columnstore at SF 10000 should be 5TB,
and 14TB in rowstore,
so there should have been heavy disk IO in both results.

The overall composite score is 2.55X higher with column-store and 3.1X higher on the Power test.

The 22 individual query run times from the Power test at 10TB are shown below.

The largest gain with column-store is Query 6 at 23.2X.
Query 4 and 10 show degradation
as in the two previous cases.

TPC-H Query 10

Below is Query 10. This query is consistently slower in columnstore relative
to rowstore.

Notice that there are seek predicates on LINEITEM
for 1993-09-20 to 1994-06-17.
The actual range should be 1993-10-02 to 1994-05-02, for
1 day after the OrderDate lower bound and 121 days after the
OrderDate upper bound.

Below are the details on ORDERS and LINEITEM from the columnstore plan.

In columnstore, every operation is a scan.
There is a predicate for the ORDERS table
but not on the LINEITEM table.
Presumably storage engine must scan entire set of LINEITEM partitions
while only scanning the ORDERS partitions encompassing the SARG date range

I am thinking the reason is that with date correlation in conventional row-storage,
the SQL Server query optimizer knows that the data range in LINEITEM ShipDate is also restricted
by the lower OrderDate and the upper OrderDate plus 121 days,
corresponding to 1 day after the lower bound on OrderDate
to 121 days after the upper bound on OrderDate.

TPC-H Query 4

TPC-H Query 4 below is slower than row storage in the 3 and 10TB results. I am thinking that the reason is the same?

See
TPCH Query Plans
for the TPC-H reference queries and execution plans
at SF1 on SQL Server 2005.
The parent page TPCH Interim
has links for the SF1000 query plans with and without parallelism.

TPC-H Columnstore Summary

As with every other new feature, Columnstore is a really interesting new technology.
But think hard about what is really happening,
experiment, and remember to get good execution statistics and plans
prior to making changes,
then get the new execution statistics and plans after the change.

One reason I like to look at official TPC-H benchmark results over "real-world"
is that the benchmark system is properly configured for both before and after results.
There is a significant difference in the data size involved for each query between
rowstore and columnstore.
If the reference system has a poor storage system
(and how often have we seen this? this is guaranteed when the SAN vendor assisted in configuration),
then it is possible to produce almost any performance ratio.

TPC-E

The charts below show the progression of performance over time for the selected TPC-E results
spanning Core 2, Nehalem, Sandy Bridge and Ivy processors at 2, 4 and 8 sockets.

For the 2-socket systems, West-1 is from the first set of TPC-E results reported for Westmere X5680 with HDD storage
and West-2 is the later X5690 report with SSD storage. Both are 6-core Westmere-EP processors.
The West-3 is the E7-2870 10-core (Westmere-EX) on SSD storage.

For the 4-socket systems, West-1 is on HDD storage, and West-2 on SSD, both 2K8R2 and 1TB memory.
The West-3 is on Win/SQL 2012, 2TB memory and SSD storage.

The same data is shown below with reverse organization
showing scaling with sockets for each of the processor architectures.

To interpret performance counters and execution statistics correctly, it is necessary to know state of Hyper-Threading (on or off). In principle, at low overall CPU utilization, for non-parallel execution plans, it should not matter whether HT is enabled or not. Of course, DBA life is never that simple (see my other blogs on HT). The state of HT does matter at high overall utilization and in parallel execution plans depending on the DOP. SQL Server does seem to try to allocate threads on distinct physical cores at intermediate DOP (DOP less than or equal to the number of physical cores).

Suppose for example, that maximum throughput on 10 physical cores is 10000 call/s with HT off and 14000 with HT on (overall CPU near 100%). Then the average CPU (worker time) per call is 1ms with HT off, and 1.43 ms with HT on as there are twice as much available worker time with HT on.

In a very well tuned OLTP system, we might have very steady average CPU per call as call volume increases from low overall CPU utilization to near saturation with HT off.
With HT on, at low overall CPU, the average CPU per call is the same as with HT off, but average CPU per call increases at some point when there is sharing of physical cores between concurrently running queries. But this is still good because system wide throughput capability has increased.

In a not well tuned database application, there could be contention between concurrent queries that causes average CPU per call to increase as overall system CPU load increases.
Without knowing the state of HT, it is hard to make the assessment as to which situation has occurred.

If we have direct sysadmin access to the OS, we could make calls (via WMI) to determine the processor model number, the total number of sockets, the total number of logical processors, then determine with a lookup table matching processor model to the number of physical cores. (again, a pain)
(per LondonDBA, WMI Win32_Processor does report the number of sockets, physical cores, and logical, I must have been thinking of an older API that was not HT aware or even multi-core aware)
But we do not always have sysadmin access to the host OS, as many organization believe separation of DBA, infrastructure (not to mention storage) is a good thing, and even better when these groups do not communicate with each other, (let alone) working together with a common mission.

SQL Server version 2005 was helpful in the DMV sys.dm_os_sys_info
which had two columns: cpu_count and hyperthread_ratio
defined in version 2005 as:
1) "Number of logical CPUs on the system."
2) "Ratio of the number of logical and physical processors."
respectively.

In version 2008, RTM and R2, the definition of hyperthread_ratio was changed to:
"Ratio of the number of logical or physical cores that are exposed by one physical processor package."

in 2012 and 2014, slightly different wording but same meaning:
"Specifies the ratio of the number of logical or physical cores that are exposed by one physical processor package."

WTF???
why the change in definition?
There are actually 3 pieces of information we are interested in:
a) the number of sockets
b) the number of physical cores per socket
c) the state of HT (or the logical processors per socket)

In 2005, we have information to determine the product of A and B, and the value of C,
but not atomic values of A and B,
In the 2008 and later version, we can determine A (using the ratio) and the composite product of A x B x C, but not atomic values of B and C.

Ok, then I noticed that in SQL Server version 2012 and 14, there would be a line in the log of the form:
"SQL Server detected 4 sockets with 10 cores per socket and 10 logical processors per socket, 40 total logical processors; using 40 logical processors based on SQL Server licensing."

So from this, I have A, B and C, even though I must parse the error log for this info.
In version 2008R, the info is only: "Detected 40 CPUs."
which has no additional information to what is in the DMV.
It would be helpful if this information were available directly from the DMV, but then life might be easier?

Three years ago, I conducted an extensive investigation on a SQL Server system
running kCura's Relativity document e-discovery application.
It was fascinating to see the broad range of problematic queries all from one application.
This provided good material for my presentation Modern Performance which
focuses on the more spectacular problems that can occur with a cost based query optimizer.

(I am not sure why the images are not showing up. See the alternate link Top Clause)

It should be pointed that unlike a typical application in which the key queries
can be rigorously tuned, Relativity must generate the SQL from options in the UI.
The objective of Relativity is to support complicated searches,
with heavy emphasis on queries of the form: IN set A but NOT IN set B.
This causes problems in row estimation because there is no generally valid logic
to assess whether there is overlap between Set A and Set B even if row estimates
on the individual sets are possible.

If this were not difficult enough, there can also be nested
AND/OR combinations.
SQL Server has difficulty generating good execution plans even for a single AND/OR
combination.
It is unfortunate that the most direct conversion of natural (user-oriented) logic
to a SQL expression (that Relativity employs) just happens to be the form
for which the SQL Server query optimizer has difficulties in producing a good execution plans.

Relativity 8.1

This article is based on a brief observation of Relativity version 8.1.
The first Relativity article was
originally based on version 7.3-7.5, and later updated with observations of
version 8.0.

Relativity Architecture

The architecture of Relativity first employs a SELECT COUNT query to determine the number
of rows that meet a specific search query.
A second call is then made in the form of a SELECT TOP 1000 query to retrieve just the document identity
column (ArtifactID) values.
There should be a third query that retrieves all the desired columns
for specific ArtifactID values, but this query is very low cost and does not warrant discussion here.
If more than 1000 rows are needed, then the next query will be TOP 6000.

One observation is that even when the COUNT query indicates that there are fewer than 1000 rows,
the ArtifactID query is still issued with the TOP 1000 clause.
In earlier versions of Relativity (7.x), the TOP 1000 query was issued even when the COUNT query
indicated zero rows.
Perhaps an oversight by the developers
in not realizing zero rows are returned when COUNT is zero.

One aspect of Relativity architecture that is correct is the not enabling plan reuse.
The expectation is that individual searches probably have high CPU for execution than for compile
and that each parameter set could have skewed distribution.
However, in issuing explicit SQL, there is also no opportunity to fix problematic SQL.
Hence it is important the Relativity anticipates as many problems as possible
and employ good strategies for know issues.
We could wish for such, and we would still be wishing.

Problematic SQL in Relativity 8.1

There are several difficulties in Relativity queries, three of which are covered here.
One is due to the SELECT COUNT followed by TOP 1000 architecture.
The second is due to the use of the direct translation of natural (user) logic
to SQL rather than a form of SQL for which the SQL Server query optimizer happens
to produce very good execution plans.
The third is in parallelism strategy.
The data in Relativity is expected to have heavily skewed distribution
so is necessary to watch for situations where this produces ineffective parallel execution plans.

Relativity Query Example

Below is the COUNT form of an example search query to be studied in greater detail.

The actual number of values in the AccessControlListID_D IN clause is 113.
The actual number of values in each of the Custodian.ArtifactID IN clauses is somewhat over 100,
with both sets being identical.

Below is subsequent TOP 1000 query that is issued after the COUNT query.
In the 7.x versions, the TOP 1000 clause is present regardless of the number of rows
indicated by the COUNT query, and is in fact issued even if COUNT reports zero rows.
It is also very possible that either one of the COUNT and TOP queries or both are very expensive
regardless of the actual number of rows.

Alternative Queries

For the above search with the actual data set, there are in fact 232 rows.
Three alternatives queries are examined here.
One is the above query without the TOP clause.
The second alternative is the above query (including the TOP clause) but with an index hint applied.
The third alternative tested is the form below, with the OR clause replaced by a UNION.

For this particular case, the UNION will produce exactly the same set of rows
as the original query because only the Document table ArtifactID column is in the select list
and this column is the primary key of the Document table.
In the more general case with columns from more than one table in the SELECT list,
the UNION form could have a different row set than the original OR form.
The architecture of Relativity is such that the OR forms can be converted to UNION while maintaining correct results.

Earlier, it was mentioned that the SQL Server query optimizer can have problems in producing
a good execution plan for queries with a combination of AND and OR clauses.
The form shown above is set A OR set B, with A having an AND clause.
The other form of this is set A AND set B, with either A or B having an OR clause.
The second form could probably be handled by converting the AND to an INNER JOIN,
which would require both conditions to be true, but a full study has not been done on this.

Note top right operation in the above execution plan for the TOP 1000 query.
The operation is an Index Scan on index EV_ArtifactID.
The index lead key is ArtifactID, and has all the columns required for this query.

Below left is the Index Scan detail.
Notice that the Estimated I/O cost is 85,
corresponding to approximately 892MB (I/O cost 1 = 1350 pages or 10.5MB).
Below right is the COUNT query Nested Loops operation at the top left of the plan.

Below are the left most operator showing total plan cost for the COUNT and TOP 1000 queries respectively.

,

The TOP 1000 plan cost is 0.31269 even though the Index Scan on Document table index EV_ArtifactID
has an I/O of 85.38.
This is because the execution plan is expecting the first 1111 rows from Documents
to be sufficient to meet the total required 1000 rows.
The plan cost for the COUNT query is much higher at 519
as all rows must be evaluated to test the match to the search arguments.
The Document Index Scan in the COUNT query uses the IX_AccessControlListID_D index
because this index is narrow with cost of 35.46 (272MB)

Below is the estimated plan for the SELECT query without the TOP clause
(full plan)

,

The estimated row count is 11,569,800, exactly the same as in the COUNT query
at the Nested Loops operation just before the rows are aggregated into a COUNT value.

There are 12.8M rows in the Document table,
so the query optimizer believes that about 90% of row meet the search argument (with OR clause).
The execution plan is the same as the COUNT query except that the
return list requires a sort operation
contributing to the higher overall plan cost of 720.

Below is the estimated plan for the TOP query but with an index hint applied
(full plan)

The use of the index hint results in the query optimizer not changing the join order.
Hence when using hints, it is also necessary to write the query in the form with the desired join order.
The hinted index lead key does not match in the ORDER BY clause,
so the entire index is scanned and then sorted.
The plan cost 197 is more than the original TOP query, but less than the no TOP query.
The reason is that the query optimizer believes it can exit the execution plan once the TOP 1000 rows have been found.

Below is the estimated execution plan for the UNION query.
(full plan)

The Estimated Number of Rows is 3.2M and the plan cost is 92.8.

Curiously, the number of rows from each of the two sub-queries is much less at 23,764 and
923,036.

One would think that the UNION of the two result sets should at least equal to the larger
and could be as high as the sum.

Relativity Query Execution Times

Below are the execution time in milli-seconds for both CPU and elapsed times of each of the 5 queries.
The first is the COUNT query, followed by the Relativity standard TOP 1000 query.
Next are the 3 variations considered: without the TOP clause, with an Index Hint
and finally a UNION structure instead of OR in the WHERE clause.

Query

CPU time

elapsed time

COUNT

138279

69109

TOP 1000

152148

152298

no TOP

143973

71857

index hint

167671

22016

UNION

1665

324

The standard Relativity TOP query does not have a parallel execution plan
as the plan cost (0.31269) is below the cost threshold for parallelism.
Even though some of the operations in the plan show a cost greater than 0.3,
the Top clause believes that the query can terminate after few rows
from Documents (estimate 1111) have been examined.

In this example, the WHERE clause arguments are highly selective,
and fewer than 1000 rows meet the conditions.
So what happens is that the full set of 12.8M rows from the right most loop join outer source
must be processed, as the Top clause "exit" criteria is never reached.
Furthermore, the execution in not parallel, because it is believed to be a low cost plan.

There is not a significant difference in CPU times
between the COUNT, regular TOP, no TOP, and TOP + index hint query plans.
The differences are mostly in the elapsed time.
The regular TOP query has the longest elapsed time being a non-parallel plan as explained above.
The COUNT and no TOP queries have elapsed times approximately one-half of the CPU time,
corresponding to a 2X speed-up with parallelism even though the actual degree of parallelism
was 8 (on separate physical cores).

Parallel Execution Plans

There are two critical factors/challenges in parallel execution plans.
One is to divide the work evenly among multiple threads (each running on different cores).
The second is to have sufficiently large granularity of work on each thread before
some form of synchronization is required.
My recollection was that SQL Server 2000 employed a method that ensured even distribution
by having each thread process one page at a time(?) This was fine in the Pentium II/III 500MHz generation,
but was far too small by the NetBurst and Core2 architecture processors.

SQL Server 2005 employed a different methods with the strategy of allowing larger granularity
and reduced need for synchronization between threads(?) but could also result
in having highly uneven distribution of work between threads.
Some of this was reported to have been fixed in SQL Server 2008 sp1,
see Using Star Join and Few-Outer-Row Optimizations to Improve Data Warehousing Queries
but apparently this is still an issue in SQL Server execution plans?

In the COUNT and no TOP queries,
the Constant Scan operation acts as the outer source in a loop join to Document.
This is the artificial rowset from the IN clause on AccessControlListID_D.
It is known to SQL Server from statistics that this
column has highly skewed distribution resulting in the row-thread split shown below.

The distribution on the other joins are also skewed but not as strongly?

The query with the TOP clause and an index hint just happens to prevent
the SQL Server query optimizer from using a Constant Scan as a loop join outer source.
The index hint does nothing to improve the CPU efficiency of this query.
In fact it is more than 10% less efficient in terms of CPU.
The positive effect is that work is evenly distributed among threads as shown below
resulting in nearly linear scaling with parallelism (7.6 to 1).

Technically the problem here is not all few outer rows,
but just uneven few outer rows?
Microsoft seems to be aware of the problem and has fixed some aspects?
but apparently now all.
Perhaps the SQL Server engine could implement a flag or hint to avoid
execution plans that are sensitive uneven distributions?
For now, the only work-around is to look for this situation and take appropriate action.

UNION in place of AND/OR Combination

The execution plan that has outstanding results in terms of CPU efficiency
is the UNION replacing the OR clause.
It was previously documented that the SQL Server query optimizer has difficulty
in generating a good execution plan for queries with a combination of AND/OR conditions,
but has no problems when an alternative structure is employed.

There are other forms for which the SQL Server query optimizer does not produce
good execution plans.
Once these can be catalogued with appropriate alternative SQL expression strategies,
there are probably not any searches that cannot be handled.

COUNT + TOP Architecture

This actually encompasses several sub-topics.
Presumably the purpose of this architecture is to know the exact number
of documents that match a search, but also so as to not over-whelm the application server
with data.
But we should consider that 1) the query with a rowset only has an integer column,
2) even a large case should have no more than tens of millions of documents
(a small number in the modern world) and 3) the application server today has many gigabytes
of memory.
So this is not absolutely necessary?

There is also a client/application-side work around for this.
Simply issue the query to return the identity column for all rows in the search,
load the first X into an array, then continue to read but not store the remaining rows.

Consider the COUNT + TOP architecture.
There are 4 possibilities. One is that both queries are inexpensive in which case
this is not important.
Second is that the COUNT query is expensive but not the TOP.
This could happen when many rows match the search, and the TOP clause allows
the query to exit quickly.

Third is that the COUNT is not expensive but the TOP is.
This happens when the query optimizer estimates many rows but in fact there are few rows.
In this case, an appropriate high-volume parallel plan is employed for the COUNT query,
but a non-parallel plan is used for the TOP query relying on the expectation of exiting quickly.
The exit condition is never met, and the non-parallel plan must process the full
set of rows with only a single thread.
Consider also that this non-parallel plan was formulated based on low start-up overhead
(loop joins) rather than volume efficiency (hash joins).

The fourth possibilities is that both the COUNT and TOP queries are inherently expensive.
In this case, we now have to execute two expensive queries all so that the developer
can avoid a few lines of code on the application side?
(Many SQL/database disasters have been traced to lazy/incompetent coders.)

Summary

As I said in the first Relativity article,
all of the database problems appear to be solvable,
but most require action in the application code where the SQL is generated,
including the architectural strategy of COUNT + TOP.
Some problems from Relativity 7.x appear to have been resolved, such as
the data type mismatch
between a varchar column and nvarchar search parameter.
This by itself was a nuisance, but when combined with the TOP clause had significant negative consequence.

The full set of details along with a test database and queries to both reproduce and fix
the problems in Relativity 7.x were sent to kCura.
Most of the advice seems to have been disregarded.

It would seem that kCura was aware that there were problems.
In version 7.x, there was a CodeArtifact table (3 columns CodeTypeID, CodeArtifactID, AssociatedArtifactID)
that was frequently involve in search queries that would take forever,
as in 30min (or whatever the web page time-out is) to 30 months (estimated) to complete.
It is possible that the long running read queries and write activity also resulted in blocking and deadlocks
despite prolific use of NOLOCK (without the WITH keyword?).

For version 8.x kCura went to great effort to split this table into multiple tables
with names of the form ZCodeArtifact_xxx, one for each of the group values (xxx)?
The new tables have columns CodeArtifactID and AssociatedArtifactID,
so perhaps there is one table for each CodeTypeID in the version 7.x table?
(This topic is covered in
ZCodeArtifact & Statistics,
as there were a series of performance problems in queries to these tables
related to statistics.)

The problem was that blocking and deadlocks were the symptoms of Relativity problems,
not the cause. The causes were the topics discussed here: 1) injudicious use of the TOP clause
in situations in which the query optimizer makes a serious error in the estimated number of rows
when the actual row count is already known from the COUNT query,
2) generating a complicated SQL expression with combination AND/OR clauses instead of JOIN and UNION,
and 3) ineffective parallel execution plans due of skewed distribution.
One more point, kCura also went to the effort of changing the SQL a from single expression form
to one using CTEs. This may contribute to the clarity of the expression,
but does not impact the execution plan problems.

Another problem seen in 8.1 is a search involving both conventional search arguments
and Full-Text elements. The execution plan had the Full-Text Search (FTS) operation
as a loop join inner source
(see FTS),
probably because the estimate number of rows from the outer source
showed 1 (which could mean 0).
This might have been because the ZCodeArtifact_xxx table was newly generated and statistics were not updated?
The query produced a good execution plan after statistics were updated and had quick actual execution time as well.

A great session by Adam Machanic at SQL Saturday Boston the previous weekend
on methods to influence the query optimizer while still letting it do its task.
The gist of this is that while SQL Server has what are called Query Hints,
there are adverse consequences.
The Join Hints (Loop, Hash and Merge)
"specify that the query optimizer enforce a join strategy between two tables,"
but also results in the query optimizer not bothering to investigate
the different join orders, even though only the join type was specified.
Hence the general advice is that one should not use the SQL Server Query/Join Hints
unless one is prepared to completely override the query optimizer,
which is essentially to say, one should almost never use join hints.
Microsoft's advice is:
"we recommend that hints, including , be used only as a last resort by experienced developers and database administrators."
Adams' session investigated an alternative method of providing advice to the query optimizer without causing it to otherwise shutdown.

Now that we have said that the Loop, Hash and Merge Join Hints should almost never be used, and without recommending the use of hints, consider the question of how to use hints in the case of a last resort situation.
Given the fact that the query optimizer disables join order optimization when hints are applied, the task is to reconstruct a good join order.
It is explained elsewhere the general preference regarding join order.
See either my articles on
www.qdpma.com/
on the
Query Optimizer
(mostly I just examine the formulas, without bothering on the explanation),
articles by
Paul White,
Benjamin Nevarez
and others.
Here will only examine the technique of join ordering.

In a two table join, there is only one shape, one table as the outer source in the upper right of the execution plan and the second table as the inner source in the lower left of the execution plan
as in the diagram below.

We can reverse the order of the join, or change the type of join,
but there is only one shape.

In a three table join, there are two possible shapes.
One is linear: the first table is the outer source, joins to the second table (inner source),
and then the output of this is the outer source for the final join with the third table as the inner source.

The second possible shape is that one table is the outer source in one join
to another table. The output of this is now the inner source in the other join
with the third table as the outer source.

From these two basic shapes, we can assemble almost any possible execution plan
(sorry, but I do not have examples with the spool operation, if any one would like to comment on these).

Until a few years ago, I had always been under the impression that it was
necessary to write out the full sub-query expression in order to force a bushy join,
example below.

SELECT xx FROM A JOIN (SELECT xx FROM B JOIN C ON xx )ON xx

The both join shape and order are forced with either a join hint or the
OPTION (FORCE ORDER) clause.
In a complex query with a long SELECT list, this style of expresssion quickly becomes cumbersome.
Then one day, I needed to relax, so I read one of
Itzik Ben-Gan's books
and saw a style of SQL expression on joins that I had never seen before.

SELECT xx FROM A JOIN (
B JOIN C ON xx )ON xx

There is no SELECT in the sub-expression!

My heart skipped a beat.

What would be the execution plan join shape be if there were a join hint
or force order hint on this expression?

Below is an SQL query example from Adam's session.

The execution plan for this query is below. Note that the join order is different than in the SQL.

If we forced a hash join, we would get the linear plan below.

Note that the join order is the same as in the SQL.

We could write the SQL in the form below.

But without a hint,
the execution plan is the same as the original (natural) plan.

Now if we were to force the join order in the new SQL, as below

we do indeed get the bush shape with the join type.

We now have the basic techniques for writing SQL with the objective of forcing a particular
join shape and order, to which we could apply join hints that also override
much of the query optimizer.

Again, this is not an endorsement of using join hints.
Do not use join hints without understanding that it has the effect of overriding the query optimizer
on join ordering, and the implications.
I do not accept any consequences on the use of join hints unless I was the consultant engaged.
OK, so I just gave you a loaded gun while saying don't blame me for its improper use.

Appendix
Search Microsoft Technet for the terms
Advanced Query Tuning Concepts,
Understanding Nested Loops Joins,
Understanding Merge Joins, and
Understanding Hash Joins.
I seem to have forgotten that role reversal was a feature in hash joins?

ps

Note that Adam's session is the "Gentle Art ..."
Join hints and force order is definitely the bulldozer and burn approach

I used to build white box servers because there were usually enough spare parts left over from upgrade projects. (management did not see the need for non-production systems, so I arranged for there to be spare parts). But since 2002 or so, I have been buying Dell PowerEdge servers for my own test environment.
This was in part because of the hassle of troubleshooting connections to multiple SCSI HDDs, was it the cable or connector?

In the Nehalem/Westmere time frame 2009-10, I decided to step down from a 2-socket system of the previous generation (PowerEdge T2900) to a single socket system, the T110 II. In principle, this was because single socket systems had become powerful enough for me to demonstrate important characteristics I need for my papers, such as generating 2.4GB/s in IO bandwidth. In practice, it was also because I sit in the same room as the servers, and the T2900 had noisy fans while the T110 II was whisper quiet.

Processors - Intel Xeon E3-1200 series v3, Haswell

For the current generation processor, the Intel Xeon E3 v3 based on Haswell,
Dell decided to focus on pre-built ready to ship systems rather than build to order systems. The only E3 processor option in the Dell T20 is the E3-1225 3.2GHz nominal and 3.6GHz Max Turbo. This system has 1 PCI-E x16 gen3 slot and 1 x4 G2 slot.

Graphics is not normally important in a server, as it usually resides in a server room and is accessed via remote desktop or even completely remote administration.
The previous generation T110 II used an old Matrox G200eW 8MB graphics (based on a 1998 design?) that only supports normal video resolutions (1280x1024?, ok I am getting 1600x1200 on the T100II).
The new T20 with E3-1225 has the Intel P4600 graphics.

For some strange reason my T20 would only power up with 1 DIMM socket populated.
I opened a case with Dell Technical Support, but they seem to have lost track of the ticket. I wonder if the people are still there. Or have they been outsourced?

So I thought that I would give building my own server another try.
I got the Intel Xeon
E3-1275 v3 3.5GHz nominal and 3.9GHz Max Turbo ($350 versus $224 for the 1225, but less than the $552 price tag of the 1285). The 1225 to 1275 processors have the P4600 graphics, which support 3 displays.

Supermicro X10SAE Motherboard

My motherboard of choice is the Supermicro
X10SAE with PCI-E 1 x16 and 1 x8 gen3 slots.
The E3 v3 only has 16 PCI-E gen3 lanes.
The Supermicro motherboard has an ASMedia Switch (ASM1480) that redirects 8 lanes from one slot to another slot so that all 16 lanes connect to a x16 slot
if that slot has a x16 adapter and the x8 slot is unpopulated?
Otherwise, both slots are x8?

If the ASM chip is a PCI-E expander, then in principle, both the x16 and x8 slots have all lanes always connected, its just that half of the x16 lanes are shared with the x8?
The ASMedia website describes the
ASM 1480 as a multiplexer/demultiplexer.
But there is not a detailed document.
I would hope that in the situation of simultaneous traffic, priority is given to the x8 slot, as the x16 slot should direct traffic to its x8 dedicated lanes? but there is no protocol to support this mode?

What I like about Supermicro is their deep lineup of server class motherboards with almost every conceivable slot arrangement.
I recall that when Intel spent a huge amount of money to focus on one motherboard for an entire processor class, not optimal for any particular purpose.

Display - Dell P2815Q 3840x2160

I also got the new Dell P2815Q monitor currently $699. It had priced higher, but Dell offered a second monitor for a discount, so I bought two.
This has a 28in diagonal, and maximum resolution of 3840x2160 at 30Hz.
The low refresh rate at maximum resolution would not be suitable from gaming.
Neither does the P2815Q have the glossy display popular in home entertainment.

But it is perfect for viewing SQL Server execution plans.
At standard zoom (80%) I can see 17 execution plan operators horizontally across the 3840 pixels.
Connecting two of the monitors would display 34 operators?
Of course, it might be more important to have dual monitors in portrait mode,
but I do not know where to get the stands.
(per Dave, the P2815Q does rotate)

I might give the UP2414Q at $1149 a try. The UP3214Q at $2799 is too expensive for my needs. The other large screen with high-resolution is the U2713H at $999 supporting 2560x1440. I have two XPS 27in AIO with apparently the same 27in display?

Storage - LSI 9361 PCI-E gen3 12Gbps SAS

My preference would be to plug in 2 PCI-E gen 3 SSDs capable of the full (or nearly) x8 slot bandwidth of 6.4GB/s, at least on the large block read side.
This is to avoid a jungle of SATA power splitters and cables inside the system. However, for some reason, there are no PCI-E gen3 SSDs?

There are PCI-E gen 3 RAID controllers with either 2 x4 12Gb/s SAS interfaces and also some with 24 (x1) 6Gbps ports. There are no 12Gbps SSDs so if I used the standard 2 x4 ports at 12Gbps, I would have to find some enclosure with 12Gbps capable expanders, which will of course escalate the cost.

All of this is rather unfortunate for building cost optimized high bandwidth storage system. NAND chips currently operate at up to 333MHz. This means 20 channels could saturate the full PCI-E gen 3 x8 bandwidth, even though we would probably use 24 for RAIN and general downstream over-configuration.
At 32GB per channel (4 x 64Gbit die) and 24 channels, the raw capacity is 768GB would be a very inexpensive storage yet capable of 6GB/s read?
Previous generation PCI-E NAND controllers supported 16 and 32 channels.

The standard SATA-NAND controller has 8 channels. This was a good choice when NAND was 100MHz. Now this means we have too much (but unusable) downstream bandwidth.

The new NVMe NAND controllers might offer the option of connecting to either 6Gbps SATA or x2 PCI-E gen 3, which would be 1.6GB/s, but I am not sure when we would have supporting infrastructure.

The upcoming (now) LSI SandForce SF3700
can interface to either PCI-E gen2 at x2 in the 3719 & 3729 models or x4 (3739 & 3759) and SATA at 6 Gb/s (all models)
(SF3700 datasheet).
There are 9 channels on the NAND side.

SQL Server 2014

I just installed SQL Server 2014 RTM on this system. I notice that SQL Server 2014 does not show the Parallelism (Repartition Streams) operator, same with the Bitmap.
The Parallelism (Distribute Streams) and (Gather Streams) operations are still displayed.

Below is part of a SQL Server 2012 execution plan with both the Parallelism (Repartition Streams) and Bitmap operations.

In SQL Server 2014, the execution plan for the same query does not show these two operations.

I imagine that the parallelism and bitmap operations are still there,
just no displayed because they do not contribute to understanding the execution plan, while wasting valuable screen real estate.

Of course, having the option to reduce the spacing between operations without reducing the display font would be very valuable.
I do not think the Program Manager for SSMS looks at complex query plans to understand why this would be a valuable feature?

Wish

I would like to find someone willing to build a system with the Supermicro X9DRX+-F 2-socket motherboard
with 10 PCI-E g3 x8 slots, filling most of these with storage controllers.
This would be massive overkill as I am not sure SQL Server can consume 20GB/s from 4 controllers,
let alone 40GB/s from 8 controllers.

Interpret this as I do not want to pay for 2 12/15-core processors, 16-32x16GB DIMMs, 8 controllers, and 64 SSDs out of my own pocket.

Addendum

I have ordered a LSI 9361-8i PCI-E gen3 - 12Gpbs RAID controller that I will use in the Supermicro system w/the Xeon E3 v3 (Haswell), although I have no means of using the 12Gbps SAS signaling rate. If anyone has a 12Gbs expander board, I would appreciate it (there is not a pressing need for SSDs to support 12Gbps, we would just like to connect 12 or SSDs at 6Gbps to the 2 x4 SAS 12Gbps ports.

I also ordered OCZ Vector 150 SSDs. I will probably mix these with the original Vectors that I already have.
In my previous generation system, the Dell PowerEdge T110 II, I had the LSI 9260 controller initially with a mix of OCZ Vertex 3 and Crucial m4 SSDs. The Crucial m4's would occasionally show as offline on the LSI RAID controller, but there was nothing wrong with the m4 when attached to a SATA port. Eventually I replaced the m4 with OCZ Vectors, and since then all 8 SSDs have worked fine with the LSI 9260.

The recently announced SanDisk CloudSpeed SSDs are also of interest, but I suspect these will be OEM only products.

Plextor has a PCI-E gen2 SSD for a x2 slot (x4 connector?), rated for 770MB/s.
Tom's Hardware says its a M.2 SSD on a PCI-E board.
If is the case, then I think the correct SSD product for now are PCI-E boards on which we can plug in 1-4 or perhaps even 8 M.2 SSDs.

The M.2 form factor supports x2 PCI-E lanes. A simple board could wire up to 4 directly the lanes in the PCI-E slot. A more flexible mode would have a PCI-E expander, so that the number SSDs (each PCI-E x2) can exceed the slot width (x4, x8 or even x16).

2014-05-06

I am seeing just under 4GB/s from the LSI9361 with a mix of 4 OCZ Vector 150 and 4 older OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS SSDs.
Technically the SSDs are capable of over 500MB/s each, but in an array (2 actually, the 4 Vectors in one, and the 4 Vertex 3 in the other) with SQL Server driving IO, that's pretty good.
I got 2.4GB/s with the previous generation LSI 9260. Presumably the controller could not drive the full 3.2GB/s PCI-E gen 2 x8 limit?

The Dell P2815Q connected to my Supermicro X10SAE motherboard's display port connector does operate at the full 3840x2160 resolution, but not when connected to the HDMI connector. I do not know if it is possible to have 2 displays at 3840x2160 with just the Supermicro motherboard, or if I need to get a separate video card?

It is rather curious that the
two TPC-E benchmarks results
published for SQL Server 2014 did not employ the memory optimized tables and natively compiled procedures, given that Hekaton is the hallmark feature of 2014.
Potential for 30X gain in transaction processing have been cited in presentations and whitepapers.
No explanation has been given so I will speculate.
Why guess when I do not know?
Well hopefully someone will come out with the real reason.

TPC Benchmarks

The TPC benchmarks are meant to be a common standard that allows people to compare results of different DBMS,
operating systems and processor or storage hardware.
Many years ago, the TPC-C benchmark was very important so that one could be sure that database engines
would not have any bottlenecks in processing that workload,
which only comprised a small number of SQL operations.
An actual database application might use many different database features and there would be no assurance on
whether one or more operations not in the benchmarks had scaling limitations.

Several years ago, all of the major database players, software and hardware, contributed to TPC-E,
which was supposed to reduce the cost of the benchmark system,
increase schema complexity and be more representative (higher read-to-write ratio?).
But after the benchmark was approved, Oracle decided not to publish results,
even though every indication is that they are perfectly capable of producing very good single system results.

Oracle RAC scales very well in the TPC-C benchmark, which has a high degree of locality by Warehouse.
TPC-E does not have locality and is presumed to be more difficult to scale in an active-active cluster architecture.
At the time, RAC scaling was very important to Oracle.
Since then, Oracle has favored single system benchmarks,
especially on their Sun platform with SPARC processors.
Recent SPARC processor have 8 simultaneous multi-threading per processor core
(SMT, equivalent to HT for Intel processors).

Microsoft decided to quickly shift over from TPC-C to TPC-E.
The time frame of TPC-E roughly corresponded to the SQL Server versions 2005 and 2008 boundary.
Microsoft did not allow TPC-C results to be publish on SQL Server 2008,
and the few TPC-E results that were published after TPC-E launch employed SQL Server 2005.

One reason was that log stream compression was added into SQL Server 2008.
This is to improve database mirroring functionality.
Log compression consumes CPU cycles and is constraint to a single thread,
but reduces network traffic especially important over a WAN.
Many people use DB mirroring, and few people are up against the single core log compression throughput limit,
so perhaps this was for the greater good?

TPC-C

The TPC-C benchmark consists of 5 stored procedures, New-Order (45%), Payment (43%)
and three at 4% each: Order-Status, Delivery and Stock-Level.
The New-Order is the principle call, getting the next order id, inserts one row for the order,
an average of 10 rows for order line items,
and 10 rows updated in the Stock table.
The Stock table has 2 integer columns forming the key,
4 quantity related columns and 11 fixed length char columns totaling 290 bytes,
(308 bytes per row excluding overhead for the table).
Only the four quantity columns are actually updated.
However it is necessary to write both the original and new (?) rows in its entirety to the log?

Paul Randall says only the bytes that changed need to be written to the log,
but a key column update has the effect of a insert/delete.

It is also possible the exact nature of the Stock update statement
requires the char columns to be logged?

This would imply that the raw New Order transaction log write is on the order of 6.4KB to encompass 10 original
and new rows of Stock plus 10 rows of order line insert?
The TPC-C reports cite 6.4KB per transaction presumably including the payment transaction?

The last TPC-C results on SQL Server (2005) were in 2011,
one for a system with 4 Opteron processors and one for 2 x Xeon X5690 (Westmere) 6-core processors at 1,024,380 tpm-C,
or 17,073 New Order transactions per sec. On the assumption of 6.4KB per transaction log write per New-Order,
the raw (uncompressed) log IO would be 109MB/s.

More recently, Cisco posted a TPC-C with Oracle 11/Linux on a 2 x Xeon E5-2690 (Sandy Bridge) 8-core processors
at 1,609,186 tpm-C, for 26,819 New Order transactions/s.
There is also an Oracle/Linux TPC-C result on 8 x E7-8870 (Westmere-EX) 10-core processors at 5,055,888 tpm-C
or 84,264 New Order transactions/s.

Even if the 2 x 8-core transaction log volume were within the single thread compression capability,
it is likely that higher volume from systems with 4-socket 8-cores or even the newer 2-socket E5 v2 12-core processors
would exceed the log stream compression capability of a single core?

TPC-E

The more recent TPC-E benchmark is comprised of 10 transactions, of which Trade-Order,
representing the benchmark score, is 10% of volume.
Some of the individual transactions are comprised of multiple frames,
so the total number of stored procedures calls (involving a network round-trip) per scored transaction is 24.
If we were to work out the RPC volume between TPC-C and TPC-E,
we see that the average transaction cost is not substantially different between the two benchmarks.
So one of the cited objectives for TPC-E, being more representative of current workloads, may be true,
but the database engine does not really care.

Perhaps the more important matter is that the TRADE table is 139 bytes per row, excluding overhead.
The Trade-Order involves 1 row, and is only 10% of the transaction volume (4% of call volume?).
Several of the TPC-E transactions involves write operations,
and the TPC-E reports cited a log write of 6.7KB/trade, perhaps amortizing the other transactions.

Some TPC-E stats with raw log write estimates

Benchmark

Processor

Coresper

Score

Initial/Finaldata size

8-hourlog space

TPC-C

2 x X5690

6

1,024,380 tpm-C

7TB (83MB/WH)

3000GB?

TPC-E

2 x X5690

6

1284 tps-E

5.6/6.0TB

98(178?)GB

TPC-E

2 x E5-2690

8

1881.76 tps-E

7.7/8.4TB

378GB

TPC-E

2 x E5-2697

12

2590.93 tps-E

10.7/11.3TB

523GB

So perhaps the net difference between TPC-E and TPC-C is a 10X reduction in log write?

Hekaton

So what does all this have to do with Hekaton? Let suppose that Hekaton is capable of providing a 10-30X increase in transaction performance.
The current 2-socket with Xeon E5 v2 processor has 12 cores per socket,
15 cores per socket in the 4-socket E7 model.
This would generate 17 and 34 MB/s raw transaction log volume without Hekaton.
At a 10X gain from Hekaton,
we would be beyond the log compression capability of a single core in the 4-socket.
At 30X gain, beyond the compression capability for the 2-socket system?
All of this is just guess work. Would someone from Microsoft like to comment?

Note

See the SQLCAT slide deck “Designing High Scale OLTP Systems” by Thomas Kejser and Ewan Fairweather present at SQL Bits 2010.
It cites log write throughput at 80MB/s. It is not stated whether this was a limitation or just that particular case.
It does appear to be in the correct range from what one Nehalem-EX core can generate in compressed output.

Hekaton Math

The Hekaton performance gain math calculation is worth examining.
An example was cited of the performance in a test scenario.
In employing just the memory optimized table, the performance gain was 3X. With the natively compiled stored procedures (NCP),
another 10X gain was realized for a combined gain of 30X.

Let’s assume that baseline test query requires 100 units of work.
A 3X gain via memory optimized tables means that work is now 33 units, so the difference between tradition concurrency and the new system is 67 units.

The 10X gain with natively compiled procedures over the first step means that the 33 units with just memory optimized tables is further reduced to 3.3,
for a net reduction of 29.7.

So if we were not careful with the underlying math,
we might have thought that the 10X with natively compiled procedures was more important than the memory optimized tables.
In principle, NCP could have been implemented without memory optimized tables.

This example demonstrates why it is important to first tackle the big resource consumer first,
but the gains are magnified when secondary items can also be improved.

Addendum

Regarding the comment below on max memory opt table of 256GB,
I do not see any reason that even a modern transaction processing
database needs even half of this for in-memory data.
But it is very reasonable to have tens of TB in the DB for generally beneficial functionality.
This being the case, I think it would be nice to have a feature for rolling in-memory table data to a regular table.
My thought is that at the end of each day or other period,
the entire set transactions should be converted to a regular table,
that will then become a partition in the archive/history table.

SQL Server performance has the interesting nature in that no matter how sound and logical an idea is
on how it might behave in one scenario compared to another,
what actually happens could be very different.
Presumably the reason is that what happens inside the SQL Server engine is very complex
with very many elements to support even a basic query, including steps that we are not even aware of.
On top of this, the modern microprocessor is also very complicated,
with radically different characteristics depending on whether an address is in (the processor L2) cache,
or a memory round-trip necessary, and then whether it is a local or remote node memory access,
not to mention the implications of cache-coherency checks.

With this in mind, some aspects of the Decimal/Numeric data type are of interest.
There have been previous discussions on the fact that the Decimal data type is more expensive than integer or float,
with impact that could be on the order of 2-3X,
enough to become a serious consideration in queries that aggregate very many rows and columns with the Decimal data type.
It is easy enough to understand the integer and floating point data types can be executed directly by the microprocessor
while decimal must be handled in software, which should mean that the overhead is much higher than 2-4X.
The explanation is that the even simple matter of accessing a column in the page-row storage organization
of traditional database engines involves a series of address offset calculations for which the
modern microprocessor cannot pre-fetch from memory sufficiently far in advance to keep its execution pipeline filled.

If this is indeed the case, then one would expect that the difference between integer and float compared to
decimal would have far larger impact in column store indexes introduced in SQL Server 2012 for nonclustered
and clustered in the upcoming 2014.
The whole point of column store is to access memory sequentially to fully utilize the capability of modern microprocessors
emphasizing bandwidth oriented over serialized round-trip memory accesses.
In any performance investigation, it is always very helpful first to build baseline with non-parallel execution plans.
This is because parallel execution introduces a whole new set of variability's that can complicate the assessment procedure.
Of course, with such sound and logical reasoning, the outcome is inevitably the unexpected, hence the opening paragraph.

It would seem that the SQL Server engine follows completely different code path on operations to column store indexes
depending on whether the execution plan is non-parallel or parallel. But it turns out that is occurs in SQL Server 2014 CTP2,
and not SQL Server 2012 SP1, so it is possible the unexpected behavior will not occur in the 2014 release version?

The database was populated using the TPC-H data generator (dbgen) to produce a SF10 data set.
This puts 59.986M rows in the Lineitem table which would have been 10GB using the 8-byte datetime data type
but is 8GB with the 4-byte date data type.
The index keys are different from the TPC-H kit,
but the test here are not represented as conforming to TPC rules for official results.

Four Lineitem tables were created, all at SF 10.
Two use the conventional page/row storage, and the other two use Clustered Columnstore indexes.
The conventional tables were not compressed, while Columnstore indexes are compressed without option.
For each type of storage, one table has 4 columns of type float (8 byte),
and the other has 4 columns declared as decimal(18,6) at 9 bytes, NOT NULL in both cases.

The conventional Lineitem table average 139 bytes per row or 59 row per page with 8 byte float
and 143 bytes per row, 57.25 rows per page for the 9 byte decimal.
The table with clustered column store index averaged 44.1 and 45.67 bytes per row for float and decimal respectively.
The columnstore indexes where about 2.5GB versus 8GB for the conventional tables.

Previous test have shown that there is no difference between int/bigint, money and float,
as all are natively supported on the processor hardware.
From the table definition, the four float/decimal columns are adjacent, and should be within 64 bytes of the row header?
Meaning all values are in the same cache line?

One additional note is that this report is a quick response to a question concerning decimal overhead.
I did not have time to setup rigorous measurements averaged over 100 executions and follow-up
with an examination of anomalies. All measurements here are based on a few runs.

Page/Row and ColumnStore Performance with Parallelism

The basic test case a simple aggregate of 1-4 of the float or numeric columns along with a count,
in reference to a count only query.
For the page/row table, a clustered index (table) scan is forced.
There is no point to forcing a scan on columnstore index, due to the nature of column storage.
Performance data is collected from sys.dm_exec_query_stats.
An attempt was made to ensure data in memory prior to each measurement,
but some columnstore accesses generated a small amount of disk IO.

Below is the CPU in nanoseconds per row for the four cases at DOP 1.
The DMV reports worker time in micro-seconds, so that value was multiplied by 1000 to get nanoseconds.

The CPU nominal frequency is 3.3GHz but for single thread operations, could very be running at the turbo frequency of 3.7GHz,
somewhat more than 3 cycles per ns.
The cost of the Count only operation, forcing a scan on the entire 8GB table
(but does not touch either the float or decimal columns)
is about the same for both conventional tables at 58.8 and 60.15 ns per row respectively,
probably reflecting the slight difference in table size (3%).

The true cost structure of a SQL Server table (clustered index) scan consists of a cost for the page access,
each row within a page, and each column, typically with the first column access having high cost than the subsequent
columns, and perhaps higher cost if a subsequent columns is not on a previously accessed cache line,
and perhaps higher for non-fixed length columns that involve a more complicated address calculation.

In previous reports, I have cited the page access cost as in the 650-750 CPU-ns range for Sandy Bridge generation processors.
So about 10ns of the average row cost cited above is amortizing the page access cost (for just under 60 rows per page).

Below are the same test data, but showing incremental cost of each additional column accessed and aggregated.
The Count value is the same as above because it is the baseline operation.

Notice that the incremental cost for the first column aggregated (1SUM) is higher than the subsequent columns.
It is strongly evident that decimal aggregation is much more expensive than the float type
(and other tests show float to be the same as int and money).

The reason that we cannot put a specific value on the difference is because of the cost structure
of complete operation has page, row and columns components of which the int/float/decimal difference only involves
the last component. In addition, the number of columns of each type also impacts the differential.

Below is the cost per row in CPU-ns of the count query,
with the two conventional tables on the left
and the two columnstore indexes on the right at DOP from 1 to 8.
The system under test has 4 physical cores with HT enabled.
SQL Server correctly places threads on separate physical cores when DOP allows,
but the DOP 8 test forces both logical processors on each core to be used.
It is also clear in the Columnstore tests that there is something very peculiar.
CPU put unit work is not supposed to decrease from DOP 1 to 2.
There are certain cases when this does happen,
example being a hash join in where the parallel plan has a bitmap filter,
which is not employed (per rule) in non-parallel plans.
This not the case here, and a test on SQL Server 2012 shows the expected performance advantage
for columnstore at all DOP levels.

Below is the rows per second for the Count query.
This is the inverse of elapsed time and is better for demonstrating scaling with DOP.
The vertical axis is log scale in base 2 to better distinguish 2X.
The scaling with DOP is not particularly good in the DOP 1-4 range,
with each thread on separate physical cores.
This is believed to be the case with as CPU/row only rises moderately with parallelism to DOP 4.
This query does almost no work other than page access,
so it is possible there is contention somewhere in the buffer pool management?

Perfect scaling would be doubling performance for each doubling of DOP
(each thread on separate physical cores),
an example being from 16 to 32 rows/µs on the vertical scale from DOP 1 to 2.
An indicator of quality of the measurement the ratio of worker time to elapsed time.
In a perfect situation, this would be equal to the DOP.
At DOP 4, the ratio is unexpectedly low at 2.8.
Very good scaling is normally expected when parallelism is over separate physical cores.
Here the scaling in that case is poor,
but appears to be great when both logical processors on each core are active at DOP 8.
The sharp rise in CPU per row from DOP 4 to 8 is indicative of this aspect of HT.
Had the DOP 4 measurement indicated the correct worker/elapsed ratio closer to 4,
there would have been only a moderate increase in performance from DOP 4 to 8.

Below is the single column SUM query cost per row (in ns) for the two conventional tables on the left
and the two columnstore tables on the right.
The cost difference between float and decimal in the conventional tables is now evident though not large.
It is much more significant in the columnstore tables, as expected.

Below is the rows per second for the single column SUM query.

Below is the two column SUM query cost per row for the two conventional tables on the left
and the two columnstore tables on the right.
There is a larger difference between float and decimal in the conventional tables
compared to the single column query.
This is expected as there is more work is in column operations relative to the page and row access.
The difference on the columnstore table is than in the single column and this was not expected.

Below is the rows per second for the two column SUM query.

Below is the 3 column SUM query cost per row for the two conventional tables on the left
and the two columnstore tables on the right.

Below is the rows per second for the 3 SUM test.

The graphs below show the query cost per row for Columnstore access with 1, 2 and 3 columns,
the same as before, except with the DOP 1 value truncated.

Summary

Aspects of the Decimal data type cost relative to float have been examined,
noting the float has elsewhere been observed to be the same as int and money.
The overhead can be as large as 2-3X in conventional page/row tables,
depending on the ratio of work between page and row access, relative to column aggregation.
In queries that access small to even moderately large number of decimal values (rows*columns)
the higher cost of decimal should not be significant.
In large data warehouse queries that access ten million values, it will be noticeable
and probably start to get painful in the hundred million scale.

It was expected that the Decimal data type cost would be much high in columnstore indexes,
as the row access costs are greatly reduced, magnifying the column contribution.
First, the problem in SQL Server 2014 CTP2 with columnstore clustered index for
non-parallel execution plans was observed, and it is hoped that this problem will be resolved in RTM.
The expected large impact was observed on queries aggregating a single decimal type columns,
but the trend decreased unexpectedly for 2 and 3 columns aggregated.
SQL Server performance characteristics are not always in-line with expectations,
no matter how sound and reasonable the logic al is.

Intel Xeon E7 v2 processors (Ivy Bridge-EX) officially launched today. The E5 v2 processors (Ivy Bridge-EP) and E3 v3 (Haswell) came out last fall. The previous generation E7 was based on Westmere, so the Sandy Bridge generation was skipped for the EX. This makes sense because big systems desire 2-year product stability versus the annual refresh for 2-socket systems.
The new E7 v2 tops out at 15 cores 2.8/3.4GHz nominal and turbo compared to the Westmere E7 with 10 cores 2.4/2.8GHz. The Xeon E5 v2 top model has 12 cores at 2.7/3.5GHz versus the Sandy Bridge E5 at 8 cores 2.7/3.5GHz.

When the Ivy Bridge EP separate dies with 10 and 12 cores was announced, it seemed rather an unusual choice.
Later, when the 15-core EX model was brought, it then became clear the 12-core E5 v2 actually shares a 15-core die with the E7 v2. (the diagram below is from Anandtech, see links at bottom, this reference was inadvertently left out in the original edit)

Below is my rendering of the 3 Ivy Bridge EP dies.

Below are the 10 and 15-core Ivy Bridge EP/X die

I will try to scale these in relation to Sandy Bridge and others when time permits.
Note that the L2 cache is on the other side of the core from the L3 or rather last level cache (LLC).

The Dell website shows the new PowerEdge R920 (but not yet taking orders), featuring 96 DIMM sockets which could support 6TB memory, but 1.5TB is most economical for now, with 3TB for “moderately” extreme situations.
The HP ProLiant DL580 G8 lists support for 32GB DIMMs, so it will probably be sometime before 64GB DIMM support can be verified.
It is not clear if 8-socket system support will be available.

Server Sizing

In the period up to SQL Server 2008 R2, with licensing determined only by socket count, the obvious strategy was to pick a system with the desired number of sockets, and the most powerful processor for that type of socket. There was no point to analyzing memory requirements because it was both simple and cheap to fill the DIMM slots with the second largest available memory module (currently 16GB).

From SQL Server 2012 on, the new with core licensing dictates that we should now base our sizing strategy on the appropriate number of cores, and then determine between the E7 versus E5 platforms if applicable.

Intel Xeon E7 v2 Processors

Model

cores

Freq

Turbo

E7-x890 v2

15

2.8GHz

3.4GHz

E7-x857 v2

12

3.0GHz

3.6GHz

E7-x891 v2

10

3.2GHz

3.7GHz

E7-x893 v2

6

3.4GHz

3.7GHz

Intel Xeon E5 v2 Processors

Model

cores

Freq

Turbo

E5-2697 v2

12

2.7GHz

3.5GHz

E5-2690 v2

10

3.0GHz

3.6GHz

E5-2667 v2

8

3.3GHz

4.0GHz

E5-2643 v2

6

3.5GHz

3.8GHz

E5-2637 v2

4

3.5GHz

3.8GHz

The benefit in stepping down the total number of cores (in addition to reduced licensing cost $6.7-10K per core?) is the possibility of higher core frequency in the lower core count processors. Also consider that write (and certain other) operations are not parallelizable, so single thread operations may be running at the turbo mode frequency.

When desired number of cores can be achieved with a 2-socket system,
consider that the E7 supports 24 DIMM slots per socket compared with the E5 at 12 per socket.
Even though we have been conditioned by DBA indoctrination that more memory is better,
this "rule" originated from the days when the maximum memory configuration may have been 64MB to 1GB.
In those circumstances, every MB of memory helped reduce disk IO. By blowing out the budget on memory and months of hard work in performance tuning, and with luck, it might be possible to bring disk IO
within the capability of a storage without so many components that disk drives fail on a weekly basis.

Memory

Given the maximum memory supported today,
very few situations really call for 1TB+ memory configuration.
It is extremely likely that a 2-socket Xeon E5 system with DIMM slots filled with 16GB DIMMs (24x16GB = 384GB, $200 each, $4.8K total) is already more than enough by a factor of 4 if not ten.
More than likely, disk IO (excluding log writes) is only a sporadic occurrence.
And if we needed disk IO, we could configure more IOPS capability from an SSD storage system (that is more economical than 1GB of memory was 20 years ago) than we could actually use.
(Yet people still finds ways to run into problems!)

Unless your SAN admin dictated the storage configuration, in which case maybe go for broke on memory.

Socket Options 1 or 2 and 2 or 4

Another possible option for less than maximum core count situations is whether fill the sockets with low core count processors or only populate half the sockets with the high core count processors.

Example 1: 1 x 12 core or 2 x 6 core processors.

Example 2: 2 x 15 core or 4 x 8 core processors.

Filling the processor sockets enables maximum memory bandwidth (and memory capacity, but in this situation we most probably do not need it).

The decision criteria might be based on the parallelism strategy.
If our expectation is to run critical queries at higher degree of parallelism (8, 10, 12 or 15), one would expect that having all cores on one socket would benefit from having better (true) performance in Parallelism Repartition Streams operations, as the latency between cores is low, favoring fewer sockets of the high core count processors?
Do not bother looking at the plan cost for this, it is strictly based on a model that does not take into account the processor/system architecture.

On the other hand, if we expect to restrict max degree of parallelism lower, say 4, 6 or maybe 8, then more sockets populated with lower core count processors
would benefit in having greater memory bandwidth?

I have not tested these two scenarios side-by-side in otherwise equivalent configurations, so I ask readers to alert me if data to support this assessment should become available.
It is possible that having the fewest sockets is the better solution because of less complicated cache coherency, despite the lower memory bandwidth and capacity.

It is uncertain whether there will be a Xeon E5-4600 v2 series, as this seems unnecessary?
There is also the Xeon E5-2400 v2 series with 3 memory channels instead of 4 for slightly lower platform cost structure. We can also consider the single socket E3 v3 (Haswell) at 4 cores 3.6/4.0GHz with 32GB and 2 x8 PCI-E gen 3 slots. It might seem beneath our dignity to run on a server similar to our desktop or laptop, but the fact is this 4-core system with 32GB is far more powerful than the 4-socket systems of 10 years ago.

I bought a Dell PowerEdge T20 to test out the E3 v3 Haswell processor. Unfortunately the system would only power with 1 DIMM slot populated, not 2 or 4. Dell support has not responded. I may buy a Supermicro motherboard and chassis.

Benchmarks

New TPC-E benchmarks were announce for the E7 v2 from IBM and NEC. Below are the recent IBM TPC-E results spanning the Westmere-EX, Sandy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge processors.

Sockets

Processor

Freq

cores

threads

Memory

SQL Server Version

tpsE

8

E7-8870

2.4GHz

80

160

4TB

SQL Server 2012

5,457.20

4

E7-4870

2.4GHz

40

80

2TB

SQL Server 2012

3,218.46

2

E5-2690

2.9GHz

16

32

512GB

SQL Server 2012

1,863.23

2

E5-2697 v2

2.7GHz

24

48

512GB

SQL Server 2012

2,590.93

4

E7-4890 v2

2.8GHz

60

120

2TB

SQL Server 2014

5,576.26

At first I thought that the 4-socket E7 v2 performance gain over the 4 and 8 socket Westmere E7 also involved the new Hekaton feature in SQL Server 2014.
But then I realized that the 2-socket E5 v2 performance on SQL Server 2012 was inline with this being the traditional table structure?
The E7 v2 benchmark details have not been released?
Is there a reason Hekaton was or was not enabled?

The complete list price was $1.25M with a discount of $212K (17% of the complete price) but this might actually be a 25% discount on the hardware or just the storage. The price on the 200GB SSD (SLC?) is $3079 which should easily support a 30% discount.

I would like to know what discount levels people are actually getting on SQL Server EE? The price with Software Assurance is about $10K per core, so this might be the proper budgeting value. Oh yeah, IBM include 1 Microsoft Problem Resolution Services incident as part of the 3-year cost of ownership.

Storage

On storage IO side, PCI-E gen 3 has been available in server systems (Sandy Bridge EP) for almost 2 years. PCI RAID controllers came sometime after that. There now also RAID controllers with both PCI-E gen 3 and SAS 12Gb/s on the downstream side.
Much of the storage infrastructure (especially HDDs and SSDs) are expected to remain 6Gbps for some time.
It would be helpful if there were either or both disk enclosures support 12Gb/s SAS and RAID controllers that have 4 x4 SAS ports to better leverage the bandwidth of PCI-E gen 3 x8 on the upstream side when the downstream side is still 6Gb/s.
There is still bandwidth mismatch but such is life.

Internally, disk enclosures have (2) chips, one per controller, with each having sufficient x1 SAS ports for each bay and 2 x4 ports for upstream and downstream traffic. The two controllers supporting dual-path - with dual-port SAS devices.
We would like to be able to have the x4 ports operate at 12Gb/s per lane, while connecting to either 6 or 12 Gb/s, allowing continued used of 6Gbps storage devices. There might be 24 bays communicating at 6Gbps, more than enough to load the x4 port on each of the two controllers.

I am curious as to the lack of SSDs with PCI-E gen3 interface. Dell says their PCI-E SSDs are now on the new NVMe standard.
I suppose the effort to work this in,
along with the combo PCI-E or SATA interface has run into longer than expected debugging effort.
If so, then we will wait patiently.
In server world, it is important for new storage technology to be thoroughly tested.

The TPC-E supporting files are now available for the two new results on the Xeon E7 v2 and SQL Server version 2014.
In the IBM report, the SQL does use either Hekaton table or compiled SQL.
I will look over the NEC report later.

Database backup compression is incredibly useful and valuable. This became popular with then Imceda (later Quest and now Dell) LiteSpeed. SQL Server version 2008 added backup compression for Enterprise Edition only. The SQL Server EE native backup feature only allows a single compression algorithm, one that elects for CPU efficiency over the degree of compression achieved. In the long ago past, this strategy was essential. But today the benefits are irrelevant while the lower compression is becoming a significant liability. All the third party backup compression products offer multiple levels of compression via open source algorithms and it is time for SQL Server to follow.

As always, we shall start with the historical context. LiteSpeed was introduced sometime around 2000 when the server system would have had 4 Pentium II or III processors at around 400-500MHz. This was before there were multi-processors so 4 sockets means four cores. Today, the individual processor core (Sandy Bridge to Haswell generations) is about 20 times more powerful, 6X via frequency and another 3X on instructions per cycle efficiency. And there are be 8 cores per processor socket for Intel Xeon E5 (Sandy Bridge) and 12 in the E5 v2 (Ivy Bridge) processors. Even on dropping from 4 sockets in 2000 to 2 sockets today, the system has perhaps 80 times more compute power.

In addition, the compression code also benefit from Hyper-Threading more so than SQL Server, as there are no lock contention issues. Even the Pentium 4 first generation HT, the performance gain was 50% for LiteSpeed database backup compression.

Over the same period of time, IO bandwidth has improved as well, but not by the same degree. Fourteen years ago, 350MB/s from the IO system was good (basically 2 x 2Gbit/s FC ports). Today it is possible for an IO system to deliver 10-20GB/s, except that some brain fart IO strategy in recent versions of SQL Server effectively caps practical IO bandwidth to disk storage in the 4-5GB/s.

So the net change is that today there is far more CPU available to support compression relative to the practical IO bandwidth. To better use this, we would like to use one of the algorithm that can achieve high compression with more CPU per unit of raw data. This is valuable when the data has to be sent over a wide-area network with bandwidth limits or even a local network because the infrastructure team would not put in 10GbE for the mission critical database server and has no concept of parallel network connections.

High compression can also be important when local storage space limited and extra database backups are necessary for migration operations. Of course the occurrence of constrained storage space is a separate matter of total organizational stupidity. Hard disk capacity is cheap, even for the more reliable enterprise models ($100 per TB for 7.2K HDDs and $450/TB for 10K). Yet in a SAN that is billed as helping to reduce cost (via increased utilization), somehow storage becomes precious, doled out in driblets from the SAN admin only after a series of time wasting meetings, forms and justifications. OK I am side-tracking to my long standing feud with SAN vendors bent on crippling database performance. The bottom line is that we have CPU resources on the SQL Server system, and we can put it to good use.

Compressibility of Data

Normally I like to use the TPC-H database for performance investigations because the data generator is openly available (with source code) to facilitate independent verification and because there a good library of published reports for comparison. Of course the TPC-H database is populated with randomly generated data which has different compression characteristics than normal data (less).
This is because in a typical production database, there is prolific use of sequentially increasing 8-byte data types or otherwise having a limited range of values, i.e. 63 out of 64 bits are the same from one row to the next. Another cause is lack of normalization, meaning repeating values that are easily reduced with dictionary based compression. The exception of course is databases with extensive use of (non-sequential) unique identifiers, which have almost no compressibility.

That said below are some results with the TPC-H data set.

Type

DB size

Compressed B/U

7Z

Uncompressed tables

14.17

5.66

3.14

Compressed tables

9.55

5.54

3.29

Clustered Column stored

4.55

3.50

2.34

With no compression at the table and index level, the SQL Server backup can achieve a 2.5 compression ratio. 7z can achieve a 4.5 compression ratio on the uncompressed backup, albeit at far high CPU consumption. With compressed tables and indexes, the database size is reduced to 67% of the original size. The SQL Server backup can achieve further compression as the block size is larger allowing for more effective dictionary use. It is perhaps no accident that both the normal database and one with compressed tables and indexes backup to about the same size. Even the 7z compressions on the uncompressed backup files are about the same size.

The clustered column store has even efficiency both in the database storage and the backup. I am thinking that the storage organization makes compression more effective.
Note that the SQL Server compressed database backup is not further reduced with 7z or other common file compression utility.

CPU-Throttling

This is a simpleton’s solution. It is important to differentiate between the objective and the method. Backup compression consumes CPU. When LiteSpeed first came on the market, people asked for a means to throttle CPU. The reason was to maintain some degree of responsiveness to user transactions during the backup. Full database backups are normally done at night or during off-hours if the two are different. But there might be some user activity during the backup. So it might seem reasonable to throttle the CPU used by backup compression.

However, this is why I stress the need to differentiate between the objective and method. State the true objective as accurately as possible so that intelligent people can come up with the best solution rather than constraining the developer to artificial requirements. The reason a system is unresponsive is not because the CPU is fully utilized, but because of the wait for a CPU to become available.

In the Windows operating system from the very beginning or early days, there is the quantum. On multi-processor servers, there is a time interval of 15.625 milliseconds (1/64 seconds) and the quantum is 4 times this. A processor core can compress a 1MB block (the standard backup transfer size) in well under the full quantum. Simply yield the thread after each block. If there are any user transactions, there will be minimum wait time. And any spare CPU cycles can still be used for compression with only moderate loss of efficiency versus running for the full quantum.

Of course, a good strategy might be to impose some kind of IO bandwidth control. The key element is to key disk latency low, meaning the IO queue depth should be low. It should be possible to control this with the buffer count setting. If there are 1 or 2 buffers per thread, then the IO queue should not be over saturated with IO generated by the backup process.

My observations are that IO to lob pages (and row overflow pages as well?) is restricted to synchronous IO, which can result in serious problems when these reside on disk drive storage. Even if the storage system is comprised of hundreds of HDDs, the realizable IO performance to lob pages is that of a single disk, with some improvement in parallel execution plans.

The reason for this appears to be that each thread must work its way through a page to find the lob pointer information, and then generates a synchronous IO if the page is not already in memory, continuing to the next row only when the IO is complete.
I believe this issue could be addressed if we could build a non-clustered index where the index row header contains a pointer to the lob page instead of back to the cluster key (or heap page). Presumably this structure would be able to use the asynchronous IO capability of the SQL Server engine used for normal in-row pages. Per Mark Rasmussen’s PASS 2013 session, the index should perhaps point to all lob pages for very large structures requiring multi-level lob pointers.

Another thought is for the nonclustered index included columns could have the lob page pointer, so that we can jump directly to it instead of first going back to the table.

In the last two years, I have worked on databases that made extensive use of large text fields, prominently kCura (see
Relativity), the legal document discovery application. Typically the fields are declared as varchar(max) but it could be any of the data types that are stored outside of the row, i.e., in either the lob_data pages or row_overflow_data as opposed to the normal in_row_data pages.

It is quickly apparent that accesses to the lob fields are horribly slow when the data is not in the buffer cache. This is on a storage system comprised of over one hundred 10K HDDs distributed over four RAID controllers.

SQL Server has an outstanding storage engine for driving disk IO involving normal in-row data (of course, I had previously complained on the lack of direct IO queue depth controls.) In the key lookup and loop join operations (that generate pseudo random IO), both high volume and single large query, SQL Server can issue IO asynchronously and at high queue depth. For a database distributed over many disk volumes, many IO channels, and very many HDDs, SQL Server can simultaneously drive IO to all disks, leveraging the full IO capability of the entire storage system, in this case 25-25K IOPS at low queue depth.

Apparently, this is not true for lob (and row-overflow) pages. A quick investigation shows that IO for lob pages is issued synchronously at queue depth one per thread (or DOP). This means each thread issues one IO. When the IO completes, it does the work on the data, then proceeds to the next IO. Given the data was distributed over limited portion of the disk, the actual access times was in the 2.5-3ms range corresponding to 300-400 IOPS. This is slightly less than 10K HDD theoretical random access comprised of 3ms rotational latency plus 3.5ms average seek for data distributed over the entire disk for 150 IOPS.

SET STATISTICS IO shows “lob physical reads 14083, lob read-ahead reads 39509”, indicating read-ahead reads, but this might be for the addition pages of a field larger than 8KB? There is some scaling with degree of parallelism in the IO access to LOB pages, as it appears that the synchronous IO is per thread. On this particular system, the decision was made to set MAXDOP at 8 out of 20 physical cores, 40 logical to better support multiple concurrent search queries. A query specifying LOB data can generate on order of 1500-2000 IOPS at DOP 8, perhaps 4000-6000 at DOP 20.

It was noticed that the time to generate a Full-Text index on a table with 20M rows and 500GB of LOB data took several hours. This would be consistent with a single thread running at 400 IOPS (not all rows have LOB pages). I do not recall any single CPU being pegged high during this period, but a proper observation is necessary. It could be that Full Text indexes creation will be much faster with better IO to the LOB pages (and parallelism?).

It so happens that kCura Relativity seems to run with most normal in-row pages in memory, generating little disk activity. In this case, one possible solution is to use the TEXTIMAGE_ON specification to place LOB in a file group on an SSD array. In principle the in-row data is more important, but these will mostly like be in-memory, hence not need the fast disk IO. The LOB pages that cannot benefit from proper asynchronous IO at high queue depth operation is placed on the low latency SSD. This is the reverse of putting important data on the more expensive storage media, but it suits the actual mode operation?

Even better is for Microsoft to fix this problem. My suggestion (and I know how the SQL Server team loves to hear my advice) is to use the index Included Columns feature to support pointers to LOB pages, instead of the column value itself. Naturally it does not make sense to include the LOB column because it would be stored out of page, as in the original table.
The reason disk IO to lob pages is synchronous is that each thread must work its way into the row to find the file-page pointer? Nowhere is there list of pointers similar to the nonclustered index header. The advantages would: 1) having the list of pointers available in a compact structure that can be scan quickly, and 2) support asynchronous IO. The index row header would point to the lob pages, instead of back to the table? In order of the cluster key? Or some other column? Naturally it is necessary to understand how to SQL Server engine handle LOB IO to come up with the right solution.

At PASS 2013, there were two sessions on row and page organization: DBA-501 Understanding Data Files at the Byte Level by Mark S. Rasmussen, of iPaper A/S (improve.dk)
and DBA-502 Data Internals Deep Dive by Bradley Ball, .
The Rasmussen session also details LOB organization.